Final Word — With Thandi Modise Premier of SA’s North West Province

GTA speaks to the woman in charge of South Africa’s platinum province about BBBEE and ‘that’ secrecy Bill

GTA: I notice that your ‘extra-curricular’ activities are more cultural and social, you seem to be less interested in business, why?

TM: I think that if the government pays you a good salary, gives you good perks, it protects the poor and the vulnerable, it is a caring state, it wants to develop responsible citizens — [if it does all that, then] you owe it to that government to tread the straight and narrow.

In my province, I lead the call to stop corruption within government and in corporate society. Therefore it would be difficult for me to be involved in anything that is going to come into conflict with what I stand up on this platform and say.

GTA: The perception remains of BEE that it is to the benefit of an often small [and highly interconnected] elite. Should it be changed, perhaps become more broad-based, to achieve what was intended?

TM: Let me start of by an affirmation. Your system in SA was such that a big majority of people were deliberately disempowered, they lost their land, their education was degraded, they were taken off and divided as people, they were pushed against one another. Socially, economically, politically, the Africans lost out.

If you look at the other races, the women were just [discriminated against to] a little degree…Amongst the whites, the coloureds, the Indians, the women were just a little degree better.

You need to be very deliberate, and that is why affirmative action is a policy that I think I will go to [the] death defending. You have in the rural provinces, a big percentage of people who are not equal. Now, if you want Africans to participate in the economy of their country, you definitely have to look at different mechanisms and BEE was one. And I think within a year or two we came to the conclusion that it was open to abuse. It was open to abuse because many people used [black] Africans [as fronts] and they would not really benefit.

So, that is why we moved from BEE into broad-based economic empowerment. I come from a province which believes in sharing. We believe that if you are empowering people, you must take turns: this one got [a leg up] today, somebody must get that opportunity tomorrow. The fact is, that for broad based economic empowerment to take place, you must have the support that will ensure that any young person, any woman, any African man, any Indian, any coloured man, who wants to participate in this has some [support system].

You did not have African people as managers and we actually came to hate managers. So management becomes an issue here. You will find that the policies today are tweaked so there is an element of empowerment of people who are getting into business. There will be an outcry amongst the communities if they see that the same person is benefitting over and over, which is the reason why we are looking at changing the whole system.

Is the system bad? It is only bad because of the way it is structured. Is it wrong to benefit people who were deliberately left out of the economic level? I don’t think so.

I think that in every system you’ve got bad apples — people who were always trying to break the system and benefit themselves to the detriment of others. We must deal with the bad apples, we must create a [black economic empowerment] system that enables people to be equal. You still have [black] Africans in South Africa who cannot afford to move to a suburb, because even though legally they can move, they do not have the money to do so.

GTA: If you look at how, arguably, Zimbabwe has lost its position as an agricultural producer since their failed land reforms, and understanding everything that you’ve said about land reforms and the need for them, how do you achieve restitution of lands which were taken even from a particular family?

TM: The actual dependants and beneficiaries of the land that was forcibly taken from people are still around. I think the government has a system of identifying these people, and that is why it is working.

But in SA, so far no land has been taken by force from anybody. There are agreements, people talk and government buys the land and return the land, I can only in this instance speak for my province. We have a program and money which we have put aside to help the people who are being resettled in this land after restitution — help to make that land productive, make sure that we help find markets.

It is not true that when Africans were farming they were bad farmers. The reason they fail in farming today is because of the loss of land. They grew away from the land… they have no resources to get into it. When you analyse poverty in SA it is directly linked to the loss of land, loss of livestock, to being forced to become migrants…[Black South Africans were forced to] leave their families back home, [those families in turn were] removed from the lands they occupied, [and] put…in arable land where nothing can grow, where there is no water.

And if you want to reverse this, the state has to have the will to deal with this matter. We have farmers in the North West, white farmers who volunteer to help people who are acquiring land, whether they’re buying land out of their own pockets or the land has been restituted. And you find that if we are clever…[in managing] this relationship, there are no tensions.

In no way do you want to see the land claims in SA resembling those of Zimbabwe. I’ve seen one of the things that went wrong there, taking land away from people, getting in there, having [not a] cent to run these farms. Also, even with the people who claim their land, some in SA choose to take money because they say they’re not up to farming, [although the land was] rightfully in [that] family. That way, the land falls into the hands of people who can take care of it.

[On] the issue of Zimbabwe…I think that if they had resolved the matter sooner, they might not have had to deal with this. The delaying of resolving issues actually tends to complicate issues [rather] than resolve them, so we need to work it out.

GTA: Finally, why does your party persist with the Secrecy Bill? It seems undemocratic, unconstitutional, heavy-handed. Why can you not leave the press to be free as it as in the constitution?

TM: I think that there was a lot of mismanagement of the Bill itself. I think that if there had been greater openness about the intention of the Bill, a lot of insecurities might have been dealt with.

Once the Bill has come into Parliament, Parliament must deal with it. And frankly, each party can only speak through the members of that committee. In this instance, you have had a lot of excitement; I know that the ANC had to look into this Bill, that [it] was taken to the public, and that a lot of unhappiness came out because of the process of this bill.